Skepchick Quickies 5.20

Australian whooping cough epidemic spreads -“DOCTORS have warned parents to keep newborn babies at home to protect them from a whooping cough epidemic triggered by the “chardonnay set and alternatives”.” From Stacey.

Kirk Cameron makes me glad to be an atheist – “Cameron went on to say that Hawking “has an unfair disadvantage, and that gives him a free pass on some of his absurd ideas,” because what better way to disagree with someone than to imply their amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has been giving them a sympathy vote when it comes to their world-renowned scientific contributions?”

Are you the Bob (or was it Rob? Or maybe Bib?) from Atlanta that I met at the bar at NECSS? If/when we meet again, I will surely not recognize you, so we can have the exact same conversation all over again! Woot! (Something about Alan Sokol or my niece who will be attending Georgia Tech in the fall, IIRC? Or maybe that was a different Bob or Rob?)

You see cat and dolphin. I see two vicious and intelligent predators. Same with cat and owl, though I was seriously distracted by the invasive swallow-wort. This stuff is seriously nasty. Very hard to kill, breaking up the roots just creates multiple new plants, climbs over and chokes everything, and the seed pods resemble milk weed enough that Monarchs lay their eggs in them, but the caterpillars can’t digest the contents and die.

Good point. For example, Hawking and Thorne’s famous bet with John Preskill about whether quantum state information could be destroyed by black holes. (Hawking conceded and paid Preskill off with a copy of Total Baseball

P.S. Googling “hawking scientific controversies” produced lots of interesting links, many having little or nothing to do with Hawking.